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Wednesday, 8 May 2013

Ghosts

We are in a landscape of ghosts in the Khumbu Valley and some of
these are ghosts of my own making.

As a boy I read and dreamed of the
great heroics of men who conquered all the extremes that nature could throw at
them. The Edwardian gentlemen who set out to be the first men at the South
Pole, failed but remained stoical to the last. The idea that you could
‘conquer’ the highest mountain in the world wearing the sort of clothes that
the Duke of Argyle ceremonially dons when bagging the first pheasant of the
season on a windblown Scottish estate is somehow irrepressible heroic; daft but
heroic.

Towards Thokla Pass. Not exactly good pheasant country.

My latter day heroes were (and indeed
remain) Bonnington, Brown, Haston, Tasker, Whilans; all of whom were forging
new routes and undertaking grand Alpine and Himalayan endeavours as I was tentatively
rock climbing in England and Wales on the Roaches, Ilkley Moor and Llanberis
Pass and dreaming of far greater technical alpine adventures. Those ghosts are
here now with me – in the Himalayas; and among them are the spirits of Mallory
and Irving. Great inter-war adventurers who may – or may not have summited
Everest in 1924. The great Everest mystery; the stuff of true heroism.

But here there are also modern ghosts. At Thokla
Pass (4,830masl) at the end of a long climb from the toe of the Khumbu Glacier there
is a collection of memorials. Rock pillars, shrines, and Chorpa. This must be the highest memorial park in the
world – and because it does seem to be unplanned it has a particular poignancy.
There are memorials here to many dead. I hesitate to say victims because there is no one whose life and death is thus commemorated
who has not chosen to be here.

"Rock pillars, shrines and Chorpa." This one is for Scott
Fischer who died during the May 1996 Everest disaster.

They are all sad, but one stands out –

Babu Chiri Sherpa had by the age of 35
summited Everest 10 times. Two of those summits had been achieved in the space
of a fortnight. In 1999 this extraordinary man spent 21 hours on the summit
without oxygen. As if this were not enough he achieved the fastest ever climb
of Everest by summiting in 16 hours and 56 minutes. Clearly in order to achieve
such heights Babu Chiri must have exhibited particular care and attention to
his own survival, yet, on his 11th ascent, he succumbed to a fall of
200m into a crevasse while taking photographs. This accident occurred at camp
II, a mere 6,500 masl..

"Are you all right?" "Yes, I'm just trying to take it all in." A
moment of contemplation at the highest memorial park in the
world.

I sit on a rock high above a flat floored
valley. The valley floor is brown with isolated patches of green. Waist high
walls of loose rock form a tracery of fields protected from grazing Yaks.
Towards the head of the valley the sandy grey of a terminal moraine at the toe
of a glacier is piled up, softer and rounded in contrast with the rest of the
landscape. The far wall of the valley is steep and hung with frozen waterfalls
of impossible colours which squeeze between bleak, black rock. The ice is an
impossible translucent blue-green with the freshness of pure peppermint.

Frozen waterfall of pure peppermint

As the
wall of the valley rises the snow becomes more visible covering all but the
steepest rock surfaces and because the mountains are so steep there is
more rock than snow. The mountains are gigantic broken teeth, cracked and
chiselled and magnificent in their height and distance. Here, in this valley,
and beyond, and in the sentinel mountains there are ghosts and spirits that
tell stories of beings and ideas that have only been partially written. The
enormity makes me shiver.

" . . . . gigantic broken teeth, cracked and chiselled . . . . ."

Then there is an entirely unexpected vision
from a past time.

The elevation is high and the road steep,
toiling up to Thokla Pass where, although we do not yet know it, we will see the sad
memorials to past ghosts. It is cold and we can feel the wind chill factor in
the air. We are spread out and mixed up with porters, Yak trains and the one
other trekking party on the path.

I look up and see an imposing Gentleman
descending towards us. He is a large figure, even in this landscape. I realise
with an exquisite shudder that this presence is so striking because he is so
incongruous. Amongst trekkers and porters who are colourfully clad in the
finest reds, yellows and blues that mountain equipment shops can sell, and
alternative Chinese manufacturers can provide, this fellow is dressed in
worsted cloth of what I must assume is the finest that can be had, is the
colour of burnt umber and suggests ‘Burberry’ rather than ‘First Ascent’ ‘North
face’ or ‘Hi Tec’. His boots are battered brown leather that have beaten many
pathways. In contrast to a light aluminium retractable trekking pole he wields
a wooden walking stick that must be of cherry, or hickory, or beech, or some
other romantic European Edwardian hardwood. I wish that I could remember what
his headgear was – I know it was not a deerstalker – although it should have
been. Perhaps he was bareheaded.

This vision offers in a dark brown resonant
voice entirely in keeping with his stature the friendly information that it is
a lot colder “up there” gesturing from whence he has descended. I so much want
to ask him his name, but my throat has suddenly dried. I want to say to him –
“Sir, are you by any chance named Irving or perhaps even Mallory? And if by any
chance you are either of these two gentlemen I wonder could we have a little
chat because there are a couple of questions I would love to ask you.” I don’t,
I can’t, but nod breathlessly to him as he stands to one side to let us pass.
“Namaste” and “Dhanebhat” is all I can manage.

"It's a lot colder up there"

A few metres further on I turn to look down
on this large shambling tweeded figure descending the steep broken path. I
can’t help thinking that perhaps there really does go the temporal spirit of Irving
– or Mallory; released by Sagarmatha after ninety years of incarceration. Whichever
one it is has finally scraped together all the necessary molecules and scraps of
DNA to re-construct himself and return from the ultimate mountain. And if it isIrving, is
Mallory just behind? Or did Mallory make it out a couple of days, months, years
or decades earlier?

I truly hope that it was one or the
other, and I am happy that I will never meet the kindly avuncular man again
because I would be duty bound to ask the question I did not have the courage to
ask this time and do not want to be disabused about him. And as a matter of
interest, much later, when questioned about this fleeting incident Lavern
remembered thinking that the man had a familiar face but could not place this
feeling of familiarity, or for that matter whether he was wearing a hat . . .

Just another ghost.

"Just another ghost". Although this is a real very high flying
White Necked Raven flying like Iccarus into the sun above
Lhotse